Does everyone who creates content for your brand deliver the consistent result you want?

With a flood of quick turnaround content requests and content published across channels from Twitter to Vimeo to print, Marketing has a lot to keep track of.  Dispersed resources—including in-house digital marketing, marcom, social media, product marketing and sales teams—plus remote teams, freelancers or agencies, makes executing a consistent brand more complicated more difficult than ever before.

The first step in getting this right is developing a great style guide. Your guide should be detailed, visual and shareable. Consider these tips:

• Choose details wisely. It’s quite easy to go overboard with a style guide. If your style guide is 300 pages, it’s not likely anyone is absorbing the nuances.
• More visual content will yield more consistent execution. Include examples of everything that’s important to you. This may include illustration examples, photography references and examples of where and how different versions of your logo should be used (or not used, if that has been a problem for you).
• Most importantly, your guide should be a living document. Static, PDF style guides are important, but having a shared platform to access the most up-to-date style guide is critical to making sure all users are accessing the same version.

Below is an example of a simple and clear Style Guide.

This example is based on Lyftz, a fictitious cloud-based supply chain management platform providing order fulfillment, inventory management, order management, and distribution management. This imaginary cloud-based platform integrates all critical functions required for end-to-end order fulfillment, while providing the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing demands or systems. As a result, their customers are empowered to address today’s ever-changing supply chain demands with a more modern, flexible approach that enhances operational efficiency, improves accuracy, rapidly adapts to changes, and boosts customer relationships.

See an example of a detailed content brief from Lyftz.